Designing Smart Cities Research Articles

Combining SysML and Timed Coloured Petri Nets for Designing Smart City Applications

A smart city is an urban centre that integrates a variety of solutions to improve infrastructure performance and achieve sustainable urban development. Urban roads are a crucial infrastructure highly demanded by citizens and organisations interested in their deployment, performance, and safety. Urban traffic signal control is an important and challenging real-world problem that aims to monitor and improve traffic congestion. The deployment of traffic signals for vehicles or pedestrians at an intersection is a complex activity that changes constantly, so it is necessary to establish rules to control the flow of vehicles and pedestrians. Thus, this article describes the joint use of the SmartCitySysML, a profile proposed by the authors, with TCPN (Timed Coloured Petri Nets) to refine and formally model SysML diagrams specifying the internal behaviour, and then verify the developed model to prove behavioural properties of an urban traffic signal control system.

A Framework for Simulating the Suitability of Data Usage in Designing Smart City Services

A Framework for Simulating the Suitability of Data Usage in Designing Smart City Services

The importance of urban green spaces in the development of smart cities

In the era of modernization, urban green spaces (UGSs) are attracting increasing attention in smart city (SC) development. There is currently a paucity of UGSs, and their importance has become crucial in enhancing life expectancy and health. To meet people’s demands, scientists are busy designing smart cities under flagship programs for urban transformation. UGSs are relevant in the analysis and investigation of improved lifestyles. The scarcity of UGSs can have many social and physical impacts. The presence of UGSs in smart cities is proposed to improve residents’ lifestyles. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with residents, officials and government experts to inform the development of UGSs further. The result of the surveys analyzed using the MAXQDA software, which presents the importance of SC and the residents’ satisfaction. The results show an urgent requirement for larger UGSs to enhance the security and economic opportunities within urban environments. The deployment of USGs is particularly relevant to fully enhancing residents’ lifestyles and health. The present research aligned with the World Health Organization (WHO) standards to identify the scope of UGS initiatives in different parts of the city of Graz, Austria, and recommendations for improving the quality of future UGS planning is provided. The proposed research results conclude that UGS is a valid alternative to enhance air quality, with measurable and substantial air pollution changes even in space-constrained sites.

ADOPTING A SUSTAINABLE URBAN DESIGN TO IMPROVE THERMAL COMFORT IN AN ARID CLIMATE

Greenery strategies and shaded pedestrian passages have become requirements for designing smart cities in developed countries. One of the most difficult challenges for designers is designing cities in hot and arid climates while maintaining a proper level of outdoor thermal comfort. The designers focus on creating a comfortable climate for people throughout the afternoon under the hot sun, particularly in countries where summer temperatures rise excessively for more than seven months per year, as in Iraq. This study compares two Baghdad cities: Haifa Street, which was built in 1984 on a Western design pattern, and the second city, which the researchers designed according to the requirements of construction in an arid climate, such as street and building orientation, aspect ratio, sky view factor, the influence of courtyards, and the role of albedo. The second city is planned to cover the same total area as the first. The results of the two cities were compared and analyzed using ENVI-met software. To conduct a comparison between the two cities on a typical summer day, two indices, PMV and Tmrt, were used. The results showed that the proposed new city design reduced Tmrt and PMV, contributing to improved thermal comfort. The proposed design reduced the Tmrt value in the model by 10.5°C in proportions of 90% of the total urban area. Furthermore, the suggested design offers superior thermal values on a typical summer day than Haifa Street.

Are smart cities green? The role of environmental and digital policies for Eco-innovation in China

In this paper, we employ negative binomial and quasi-natural experimental methods (i.e., Difference-in-Differences and Propensity Score Matching), whereby we examine the joint impact of environmental and digital policies (for designing smart cities) upon the generation of eco-innovations in China. Using longitudinal data for the period 2006–2018, we examine the changes in green patents granted: (i) due to the implementation of various levels of stringency of environmental policies across all cities; and (ii) after the introduction of smart city policies in 2012 in China. The prior literature stresses the importance of environmental policies, yet less attention has been paid to digital policies required to drive eco-innovation and their spatial dimension in the context of a developing economy. Our results show that, when digital policies (artificial intelligence and internet of things) are implemented in cities that have adopted strict environmental policies, the production of green patents increases. We contribute to debates in the literature of policy mix for sustainability transitions in the context of a developing economy by illustrating the importance of both types of policy for eco-innovation, as they correct two market failures and, more importantly, address the systemic coordination problems that occur during the production of green patents.

The Role of Environmental and Artificial Intelligence Policies for Eco-innovation in China

In this paper, we employ negative binomial and quasi-natural experimental methods (i.e., Difference-in-Differences), whereby we examine the joint impact of environmental and artificial intelligence policies (for designing smart cities) upon the generation of eco-innovations. Using longitudinal data for the period 2006-2018, we examine the changes in green patents granted: (i) due to the implementation of various levels of stringency of environmental policies across all cities; and (ii) after the introduction of smart city policies in 2012 in China. The prior literature stresses the importance of environmental policies, yet less attention has been paid to the other types of policies required to drive eco-innovation and their spatial dimension in the context of a developing economy. Our results show that, when artificial intelligence policies are implemented in cities that have adopted strict environmental policies, the production of green patents increases. We contribute to debates in the literature of policy mix for sustainability transitions in the context of a developing economy by illustrating the importance of both types of policy for eco-innovation, as they correct two market failures and, more importantly, address the systemic coordination problems that occur during the production of green patents.

CONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN OF SMART CITIES ON THE EXAMPLE OF CHINA

This article focuses on building and designing smart cities due to the abundance of traffic and congestion in local areas. Currently, urban planning is facing environmental, economic, social and other aspects of the problem, the main reason for which is that the city has not become a self-regulating and sustainable development system. Therefore, the future of urban development must follow a combination of several sustainable development paths. This is where the smart city’s concept was born. Governments at home and abroad are actively involved in building smartcities, but there is still a lack of systematic thinking about the vision, architecture, and model of smart cities, what hinders the construction of smart cities in China, so it is urgent to conduct in-depth research in accordance with the national conditions of China.

Use of blockchain in designing smart city

PurposeA blockchain is a shared distributed ledger technology that stores the information of every transaction in the network. The blockchain has emerged with a huge diversity of applications not only in the economic but in the non-economical domain as well. Blockchain technology promises to provide a wide range of solutions to the problems faced during implementation of smart cities. It has the potential to build smart contracts more secure, thus eliminating the need for centralized authority.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a proof-of-concept for a use case that uses an Ethereum platform to build a blockchain network to buy, sell or rent a property.FindingsThe findings of this study provide an opportunity to create novel decentralized scalable solutions to develop smart cities by enabling paperless transactions. There are enormous opportunities in this distributed ledger technology which will bring a revolutionary change in upcoming years.Originality/valueThe concept of blockchain along with smart contracts can be used as a promising technology for sharing services which is a common requirement in smart cities. All the blockchain transactions are stored in decentralized shared database. The transaction recorded in decentralized system is immutable, it cannot be altered and hence chance of forgery is negligible.

A Levelled Architecture for Designing Smart Cities

A Levelled Architecture for Designing Smart Cities

Digital Watermarking Technique for Text Document Protection Using Data Mining Analysis

In the current era, information security is on its top priority for all organizations. The individuals, government officials, and military with the rapid development of Internet technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and cloud computing facing data security problems. As the massive rate of data growth, it is a challenging task for the researchers, that how to manage the vast amount of data safely and effectively while designing smart cities. It has been quite easy to produce an illegal copy of digital contents. The verification of digital content is one of the major issues because digital contents are generated daily and shared via the internet. The limited techniques are available for document copyright protection. However, most of the existing techniques produce distortion during watermark insertion or lack of capacity. In the said perspective, a digital watermarking technique is proposed for document copyright protection and ownership verification with the help of data mining. The techniques of data mining are applied to find suitable properties from the document for embedding watermark. The proposed model provides copyright protection to text documents on local and cloud computing paradigm. For the evaluation of the proposed technique, 20 different text documents are used to perform many attacks such as formatting, insertion, and deletion attacks. The proposed technique attained a high-level of imperceptibility where peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) values are between 64.67% and 71.03%, and similarity (SIM) percentage is between 99.92% and 99.99%. The proposed technique is robust and resists from formatting attacks and capacity of the proposed technique is also improved as compared to the previous techniques.

An investigation into Designing Smart city in Accordance with Designing for Children toward Child-Friendly Smart Cities

The process of urban planning should be multi-dimensional and comprehensive meaning that it takes into consideration all groups of people especially less able ones. Children are one of these groups who should be taken into consideration more in urban planning and urban design. Planning to make cities smart is one of the new approaches in urban design. However, children are often largely ignored in these plans. The researchers of the present study tried to examine the position of children in smart city-related planning. To this end, the concepts of child-friendly cities are dealt with and studied so that its common indexes with the smart city would be extracted hoping that the position of children in smart cities would be considered more. The research method employed in the study is library-based and analytic-descriptive.

A Multiple-Attribute Decision Making-based approach for smart city rankings design

Rankings are a valuable element for city-comparison purposes since results withdrawn from these comparisons can, eventually, support the evaluation of strategic decisions taken by cities. Smart city rankings are not an exception and, as they draw more attention, the number of them exponentially increases. This paper evaluates the appropriateness of existing smart city rankings for quantifying the materialization degree of the smart city concept. The analysis reveals that current rankings generally overlook indicators of the Information and Communication Technologies dimension. To bridge this gap, this work proposes a methodology based on Multiple-Attribute Decision Making that uses technological criteria for designing smart city rankings. The proposed methodology is evaluated against the cities of New York, Seoul, and Santander. Imbalances between results provided by the studied rankings and our evaluation are detected, which suggests the need for a new insight into more suitable and precise evaluation of the smartness degree of cities.

Smart Technical Street Furniture Design: Case study of ''New Cairo Administrative Capital''

The high pace of technology has redefined street furniture as smart devices that contribute to build future cities. Thus, it is a combination of passion; skills, ideas and tools of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) converted into finished products. ICT is a catalyst for cities to address these challenges in a ‘smart’ manner that links and strengthens networks of people, businesses, infrastructures, resources, energy and spaces. On the other hand, one of the most important components to be adopted for designing Smart Cities is the IT service management (ITSM). It refers to the entirety of the activities directed by policies, organized and structured to plan, design, operate and control ITSM offered to citizens by adopting a process approach towards management, focusing on their needs and stressing continual improvement.New trends in urban planning are heading to draw a new future- a Smart City that is able to link the physical capital with the social one. Street furniture, as an important element of Smart Cities, is a term used to define objects in public spaces. Such concept is related to the context of wireless infrastructure and house small-cell units. They are considered –visually- as common and tolerable places to the public.This research will focus on smart Street-Furniture design as a standard guide for designers and planners of the ''New Cairo Administrative Capital'', which is currently under construction as the first Smart City in Egypt.

Beyond Data in the Smart City: Repurposing Existing Campus IoT

In this article, the authors present a case study of their experiences in using existing IoT infrastructure to create a campus-scale living laboratory for promoting energy savings and environmental sustainability. As a series of lessons for others creating IoT systems from existing city infrastructures, they present the challenges they've experienced through their attempt to join and repurpose existing energy monitoring and building management systems as an IoT infrastructure for a campus. They highlight the limitations of particular views of a campus from a purely data-driven perspective, advocating data-aware over data-driven approaches that engage a wide variety of stakeholders. Finally, they reflect on the inclusion of people's practices in understanding and designing smart cities and repurposing existing IoT. They also highlight the need for more careful consideration of ethics and domestication when creating smart campuses and the importance of challenging the existing rhetoric around energy waste in smart cities and smart buildings research. This article is part of a special issue on smart cities.

Rule-Based Model for Selecting Integration Technologies for Smart Cities Systems

The aim of this article is to present the stages of development for an information technology integration model for the design of systems for smart cities. The Introduction explains the need for integration technologies and presents a model for selecting integration technologies and the conditions for its use in designing smart cities systems. Then two verification stages of the presented model are discussed. In the first stage, the model underwent a replicative verification in the Eureka project, the purpose of which was to build fuzzy decision-making scenarios for the needs of smart cities. In the second stage, the developed model underwent a predictive verification process that aimed at selecting integration technologies (suggested by the developed model) in the construction of an intelligent operating center (IOC) decision-making system. The article is summarized with conclusions and observations about the importance of integration technologies and the possibility of predicting them.

Escaping from ancient Rome! Applications and challenges for designing smart cities

ABSTRACTFrom ancient Europe, the renaissance and industrialisation eras, to the modern times, urban planning paradigms have evolved in many ways, advancing the environments where people live in. Nevertheless, the recent development of wireless and wired communication network technologies and low‐power miniature sensors for various application domains provide us with another chance of revolutionising cities by making them smarter. Smart cities, propelled by a city‐scale infrastructure, where information provided from different application systems integrate together, will initiate the development of new applications that can benefit our everyday lives. This article presents an overview of representative applications that consist a smart city with their respective challenges and application requirements. Furthermore, we share our experiences obtained from designing and deploying examples of such smart systems in multiple application domains and summarise the remaining challenges for making the vision of designing smart cities a reality. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.